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Joan Miró

1893-1983

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World Map: Spain

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Self-Portrait of Miro, 1917 and 1919

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The Farm, 1921-22

When Miró was seventeen, he first visited his parents’ new summer house, near the Mediterranean Sea. It was a farm in Montroig, a village about sixty miles from Barcelona, Spain. His love of the countryside in Montroig led to his lifelong custom of spending his summers there.

Miró said of The Farm: The painting was absolutely realistic. Everything that’s in the painting was actually there. I didn’t invent anything. I only eliminated the fencing on the front of the chicken coop because it kept you from seeing the animals.

Miró says that the painting is a realistic depiction. However, it seems to fluctuate between a realistic recording of the scene and more dreamlike imagery. The landscape, for instance, pulsates with hot, clear sunshine, but the blazing light casts no shadows. In the midday sky, the sun is represented by a disk that, oddly, is silvery gray – the color of the moon. A cart totters on a single wheel. Moreover, we know the barn at Montroig was well kept, not crumbling, as it seems to be here.

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The Tilled Field, 1923-24

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The Garden, 1925

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The Beautiful Bird, 1941

In the midst of producing this series, Miró was forced to flee with his family from France to Mallorca to escape advancing German troops. Evidently, the family took little else with them aside from these paintings. The crowded, chaotic feeling of these compositions in some ways echo Miró's feelings regarding the violent upheaval in Europe at the time. What does the title tell you about this painting? Do you think Miró depicts the luminous constellations in a clear night sky?

The spectacle of the sky overwhelms me. I’m overwhelmed

When I see, in an immense sky, the crescent of the moon, or

the sun. There, in my pictures, tiny forms in huge empty spaces.

Empty spaces, empty horizons, empty plains – everything which

is bare has always greatly impressed me.

-Joan Miró, 1958, quoted in Twentieth-Century Artists on Art

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Nocturne, 1940